Questioning Hollywood's depictions of the Civil War

September 16, 2001|By Benjamin L. Alpers. Benjamin L. Alpers is an assistant professor of honors, history, and film and video studies at the University of Oklahoma.

The Reel Civil War

By Bruce Chadwick

Knopf, 366 pages, $27.50

Despite the extraordinary revival of interest in World War II and the continuing divisions over the Vietnam War, the Civil War continues to fascinate and divide Americans like no other event in our past. Millions of Americans visit Civil War battlefields and read fictional and non-fictional accounts of the conflict. Thousands of men and women don period costume and re-enact Civil War battles. Nor is Civil War memory merely about the past. From battles over flying the Confederate flag to the growing debate over reparations for slavery, the Civil War is alive and well in our political life.

In recent years, a number of writers have tried to describe and explain various aspects of Americans' complicated relationship to the Civil War. Bruce Chadwick's impassioned "The Reel Civil War" is the latest addition to this literature.

Virtually from the dawn of American cinema, even before there was a Hollywood, American filmmakers have used the Civil War as a backdrop for their movies. "The Reel Civil War" provides a chronological survey of a century of American films set during that conflict.

Chadwick, who has written a number of books on the war itself, takes filmmakers to task for the versions of the Civil War they have put on screen, from "Birth of a Nation" (1915) and other silent films, through "Gone With the Wind" (1939), the Civil War-themed Westerns of the 1950s and beyond. More often than not, the movies' visions of the Civil War were monumentally inaccurate. Perhaps more importantly, as Chadwick shows, they were pernicious as well. Often based on a plantation myth that uncritically celebrated a romanticized old South, Hollywood's Civil War movies tended to present blacks in incredibly degrading ways. By contrasting these stories and images from "reel" Civil Wars with what we know of the real Civil War, Chadwick thoroughly and effectively skewers most of the Hollywood films that take the conflict as their setting.

Chadwick's approach to his material should be familiar to readers who have followed controversies over recent historical films such as "Amistad" and "Pearl Harbor." Indeed, as long as Hollywood has made films about the past, historians have corrected Hollywood's versions of history. There is much that is valuable in this kind of historical film criticism. Historical movies are unquestionably one of the principal ways Americans engage with the past. To the extent that Hollywood distorts the past for its own purposes, historians can provide a valuable corrective.

But "The Reel Civil War" reveals some of the limitations of this mode of analyzing movies about the past, especially when an author is trying to illuminate the history of public memory. Let's start with the central contrast suggested by the title, and repeated throughout the text, between history as it actually happened and history as it appears on screen.

When evaluating the veracity of a single historical film, this is obviously the most important comparison to make. But when an author hopes to describe the shape of public memory, drawing the contrast between the "reel" and the real is less significant than accounting for the varieties of the "reel," however true or false. Too often, Chadwick focuses not on explaining what was on the screen but rather on suggesting what ought to have been there. He frequently spends pages comparing a particular Hollywood film to what really happened in the events the film claims to portray. Time that Chadwick spends in the real 1860s is time that he does not spend telling us more about the world in which the films he discusses were made and seen.

The book's emphasis on the failure of Civil War myth to live up to Civil War reality tends also to obscure important differences among Civil War myths. Since the end of the war in 1865, the meaning of the conflict has been constantly contested in American public life; only rarely however, has that contest been between myth and what we would today consider real history. More often, various mythical views of the conflict competed against each other. There were important differences even among the often reprehensible views of the war that made it to the silver screen. Black characters received demeaning treatment in "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind," but those films' portrayals of blacks in and out of slavery were different from each other.